Nightside CIty (9 page)

The cab, gleaming yellow, cruised in to a
silent landing at my feet, and the door slid aside.

This one was far from new; the upholstery
showed wear and the seat’s shaping mechanism whirred as it worked.
It was still a Hyundai, of course. Not Q.Q.T., though—Midnight Cab
and Limo. Not that it mattered; I was just hypersensitive because
of my conversation with the new one from Q.Q.T.

“Where to, Mis’?” it asked.

I gave my address and settled back.

The crystal advertisers surrounded the cab,
singing antiphonal praise for some new pleasure shop, but I didn’t
care; it was easier to ignore them than to ask the cab to lose
them, as I actually had something to think about.

Several things, really.

Big Jim Mishima was still carrying a grudge;
that was bad news. I glanced out the back, and there was the
spy-eye, hanging right on the cab’s tail, close below the trailing
advertiser.

Westwall Redevelopment was extraordinarily
secretive, and employed people that the ever-respectable Mariko
Cheng called “scum.” That might or might not be bad news, but at
least it was news.

Paul Orchid—that name seemed ever so slightly
familiar. A wire-faced slick-hair, Cheng had called him.

Zar Pickens had said the new rent collector
was a slick-hair, but that didn’t mean much; you’ll always find
faddies around, whatever the current bug is, and slick hair had
been hot among the City’s faddies for months. Pickens hadn’t said
anything about a wire job, but still, Orchid might be the rent
collector. If not, then maybe Westwall had a thing about slick
hair.

My own hair’s always been strictly natural
finish, but that’s more for lack of funds than anything else. I
wondered who made the best hair slickers, and whether they had any
connection with Nakada Enterprises.

I caught myself. That, I told myself, was
going off on a random vector. I might throw the question at the com
when I had time, but it wasn’t worth my own mental electricity.

Something flashed white overhead; I looked
up, too late to tell if it was an exploding meteor or some sort of
floater or some idiot hot pilot buzzing the city on his way into
port. Another advertiser cruised up, saw the direction of my gaze,
and projected a little phallic imagery above the cab as an
attention-getter.

I’d seen enough of that back at the Manhattan
Lounge; I leaned back and closed my eyes and stayed that way until
the cab announced, “Your destination, Mis’.”

“Thanks.” I slid my card in the reader, and
when the fare registered I pulled it back out and put it away; this
cab didn’t give me any hints about tips, it just opened the door
and I stepped out into the wind, right on my doorstep.

The door recognized me and opened, and I went
on up to my office. When I got there I saw Mishima’s spy-eye doing
a silent hover outside my window; I bared my teeth at it, gave it
the three-finger curse again, debated making a privacy complaint,
then shrugged, sat down at my desk, and looked at the screen.

Nothing had changed. No mysterious stranger
had zipped me the fare to Prometheus. No messages had registered at
all.

I hadn’t expected any, of course, unless
Mishima had decided to make some clever comment.

I hadn’t expected the damn spy-eye to stick
with me, either; it had said I wasn’t welcome in the Trap, but I
wasn’t
in
the Trap any more, I was back in the burbs. So
what the hell was it doing hanging outside my window?

I turned my chair to face it and said, “Hey,
you hear me?”

“Yeah, Hsing, I hear you,” it said, over a
chat frequency that I heard by wire instead of ear—it knew my
hearing wasn’t as good as its own, and with that window between us
I needed the help. I had the standard emergency receivers in my
head, of course, even if I couldn’t afford a decent wrist unit.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I
asked.

“Just keeping an eye out,” it said.

I said, “Spying on me, you mean.”

“Hey, it’s my job,” it said, but the phrase
didn’t sound right in the eye’s flat machine tone. “I can’t help
it,” it said.

“I thought you were only going to watch me
while I was in the Trap,” I argued. “Out here isn’t Big Jim’s turf,
it’s mine.”

“I got a change of orders,” it said. “I’m
supposed to stick with you until I find out what you were doing in
the Trap in the first place.”

“You’re breaking the privacy laws,” I pointed
out.

“No, I’m not, because I’m not a legal person;
I have no free will. My boss is breaking the law.”

“Well, somebody is, and we can’t have that,
can we?” I blacked the window, and turned on the full-spectrum
shielding.

I waited a moment, then opened a
peephole.

The spy-eye was still there, not doing
anything, just hanging there outside my window, waiting.

Mishima owed me for this, I decided, but this
wasn’t the time to worry about it. I’d take one problem at a time,
and right now my problem was the West End.

I typed Paul Orchid’s name into my personal
search-and-retrieval net, and got back a file headed “Paul (Paulie)
Orchid.”

That beeped something somewhere, and I
remembered him. I never heard him called just Paul, but Paulie
Orchid I had encountered before. I hadn’t paid much attention,
never checked his background. He was your standard small operator
who thinks he’s going to be big someday, but who never makes it. A
couple of years back I’d brushed up against him two, maybe three
times, but never met him in person. I had no real gripes about him.
The times I’d called him he’d had nothing to tell me except a
come-on, but I never found any reason to think he’d held out. He
just hadn’t been involved.

This time he was involved.

I checked his address— the current one was
better than I’d have expected, a tower apartment on Fifth. A
crosscheck on the address told me he had a roommate by the name of
Beauregard Rigmus, known as Bobo; I’d never heard of Rigmus before,
and I was a bit surprised to see a male name there. I’d have
expected Orchid to have a woman; he’d made it obvious enough that
his tastes ran in that direction. Even if this Rigmus weren’t a
lover, he might get in the way of overnight guests.

Unless Orchid and Rigmus shared, which I
suppose they might have. Or unless it was a bigger apartment than I
thought.

I touched keys, and put in a credit search,
just a basic one to begin with. It bounced off a privacy request, a
serious one—no information to be given out without documented
consent.

I had another searcher on hand that carried a
phony consent code—one that did extra stuff underneath while it was
working, more than would be legal even if the consent were real.
Like anything illegal it had risks, so I hadn’t started out with
it, but I tried it, with the more intrusive functions optioned back
out.

It vanished. Completely. Nothing came
through, legal or otherwise. I couldn’t get the name of his bank,
or his employer, or personal references. No data, period.

Not only that, the program disappeared on my
end, as well; it just folded up and died, dropped out of the system
as if it had never been there. I couldn’t check for tampering, or
whether anyone had seen it coming; it was just gone, and I didn’t
know who knew what.

I didn’t like that at all. Whatever Orchid
was up to, he didn’t want anybody asking questions. I was pretty
sure, from what I’d read and what I’d remembered, that he wasn’t
bright enough to have programmed that himself, so I figured he must
have bought some serious security somewhere.

That brought some questions to mind. For
example, where’d he get the juice? Orchid had always been
small-time.

And what was he doing that needed that sort
of security?

What was I getting into?

Whatever it was, I was in, now. If someone
had invited me back out again I’d have given it serious
thought—whichever way it went, bribes or threats, I’d have had an
excuse to drop the whole case, and a bribe might have helped the
credit balance. Even if I had decided to stick, at least I’d have
had a chance at picking up a little more information from whatever
approach was made.

I waited at the screen for a few minutes, but
nothing came in. It occurred to me, waiting there, that I hadn’t
eaten lately, that my stomach was uncomfortably empty and it was a
reasonable time for dinner, so I got myself some bargain-brand
paté—not like the gourmet stuff you have here, I mean the lousy
stuff that Epimetheus grew. I couldn’t afford imported food, and
tailored paté was about all anyone ever grew on Epimetheus—that,
and vat-culture tofu that was worse than the paté. They’d tried to
make food out of the native pseudoplankton, but the biochemistry
was all wrong, much too toxic to clean up economically, and they
needed cheap food for the workers, so the bioengineers whipped up
that paté. The stuff I ate was even cheaper than most and tasted
like the inside of an old shoe, but it stayed down and kept me
going. I ate it, and I waited, and nothing happened.

I couldn’t wait forever. I touched keys.

Going after Paulie Orchid didn’t look like
the fastest approach after all, and the way that searcher had
vanished had me a bit edgy about it anyway, so I took another angle
entirely, something I probably should have tried right off. I went
after the money.

There’s a nice thing about money— it leaves a
trail. Always. Sometimes the trail’s hidden pretty deep, but it’s
never gone completely. If you dug deep enough you could probably
trace every damn credit on Epimetheus back to old Earth, right back
to the twenty-second, maybe the twenty-first century.

Before that there’s too much data loss, and
some people still used primitive money—non-electronic, I mean—but
who cares? I didn’t need to go back two or three hundred years. I
needed to go back six weeks.

It was simple enough. Those six corporations
had all been keeping their business secret. Their nominal officers
were almost all software, written for the purpose and with no
history to trace; that was standard for dummy corporations, had
been for centuries. They had no business addresses available; that
wasn’t unusual, either, for outfits that had no regular business.
The names of their stockholders were not available to the
public—again, no surprise. I couldn’t get at them through people or
places, unless I went after Paulie Orchid.

But they had paid out money for property.
That meant that money had come
in
from somewhere. If I
traced the money back I might learn something.

So I touched keys, and plugged in to keep a
closer-than-screen watch on developments, but I didn’t ride wire. I
kept my eyes open and functioning, just took the data as data.

I picked a transaction at random, Nightside
Estates buying a foreclosure from First Bank of Eta Cassiopeia, and
went after it.

I opened an account at First Cass, bought a
share of their stock, and then applied for an audit of operations
for a “random” date as a check to protect my investment. I had a
file that did this stuff automatically, that gave all the right
answers to the queries, and meanwhile I did a little illegal
maneuvering to intercept queries going elsewhere and feed back the
right answers to those, and in about twenty minutes I had an
account number for Nightside Estates at Epimethean Commerce.

That was interesting, since I knew that ECB
hadn’t handled their sale as an in-house funds transfer—that meant
the accounts for the dummy corporations were scattered.

Once you’ve got an account number these
things are easier; it only took ten minutes to break into the
account records at ECB. Of course, it was
completely
illegal, where my maneuver at First Cass had only been a matter of
expediting a process.

Most bank data security is pitiful; they do
so damn many out-of-house transactions that there are always a
dozen routes in.

Besides, there are a dozen different
legitimate reasons to get at information—bankruptcy proceedings,
lawsuits, whatever—so they don’t bother with high security.

Of course, that’s only true for information;
try and touch any of that money without human authorization and
they’ll get tough.

I got the account records, though. Nightside
Estates had an inactive account—net balance of zero. The account
had existed for thirty-two days; there had been three deposits and
three withdrawals, in matching amounts. In short, somebody had put
money in the account a couple of hours before beginning each real
estate purchase, just enough each time to cover the entire
transaction, from escrow deposit to deed registration.

The question was, where had the deposits come
from?

This was getting trickier; I thought I sensed
some of the bank software watching me, and the security stuff I had
evaded wouldn’t play dumb forever, but I kept digging.

The third deposit had come from Paulie
Orchid’s personal account at First Cass; that was interesting, but
not very helpful unless I went after him after all. I noted his
account number into my own com, then went on.

The other two deposits came from a
number-only account at Nightside Bank and Trust.

I noted that, too, then pulled out quick.

I waited a minute for the system to clear
itself and any pursuit to have its chance, and then went in, on
wire this time— number-only accounts are usually a high-security
item.

I knew I couldn’t get a name; that would be
in files too secret, and too well-guarded, for me to crack without
a lot of work and risk. It’s also what most people would go after,
so the security programs watch for it. I was subtler than
that—nothing too tricky, but a little less obvious. I went through
the records of statements transmitted, trying to find an address
that had accepted a statement from the account I was after.